I Remember …

Ten years is an eternity in terms of computers and the internet – here’s some stuff I remember from Way Back Then when I was new at all this.

For information purposes: I’ve been using computers since 1987, started using BBSs in 1992 and been on the internet since 1993. For any other activity, a decade of use wouldn’t be very long … but in this field, I seem to be already old enough to tell the “I remember when…” stories. So, here are mine.

I remember …

• My first laptop having no hard drive, just a single 3 1/2 inch floppy drive.
• Cafe Chrome BBS in Melbourne, Australia.
• Being taught Pascal and VMS in first year Computer Science, and not taught C or Unix at all (it’s okay, I learned from friends instead).
• After-Five MUD, the first MUD I ever played on. It closed abruptly and if it was ever re-formed somewhere else I didn’t find out about it.
• Computers at school – six Apple ][e machines with ROM BASIC for the whole 400 of us. And being the only girl who was ever in there at lunch time.
• Dad ringing me up at boarding school so I could diagnose and fix his computer problems over the phone, which I almost always could.
• Fidonet
• Gopher being a cool thing
• Knowing a huge list of PEEK and POKE addresses for AppleBASIC so I could do really tricky things like read in a key-press without waiting for somebody to press 'enter'.
• LambdaMOO when it was small enough to be usable.
• Learning BASIC by borrowing books from the library, a full six months before I'd ever actually seen a computer.
• MSDOS 2.4. I remember distinctly the first time I met this, I hadn't ever met anything that wasn't an Apple ][e with ROM BASIC before and I couldn't understand why typing BASIC commands at the DOS prompt didn't work.
• ‘rn’ being the only newsreader that I had access to.
• The first time I got paid for doing computer stuff, writing an enormous set of WordPerfect macros for Dad so he could do his end of month accounts on his computer. It took him ages to convince me I should agree to accept the money, because I couldn’t understand the idea of getting paid for something that was so much fun!
• The first time I saw the insides of a computer. Staring with rapt amazement.
• When the 286 was what Dad bought for his office.
• Windows 3.0 not being as good for my needs as DesqView.
• Word Perfect 3.2 (I think) when they didn’t write “For DOS” because that was the only type there was. And I knew all the keystrokes off by heart.